Money

On the Wednesday in early July when Rishi Sunak announced a temporary increase from £125,000 to £500,000 in the stamp duty threshold for house purchases, a record 8.5 million people visited the Rightmove property website and I’m pretty sure I was one of them. I continued visiting it weekly: it became a lockdown obsession, alongside French television thrillers, until last month I finally spotted a London flat I wanted to buy. Now, like thousands of others, I’m pushing to complete before 31 March, when the stamp duty holiday — a £15,000 saving for me but the equivalent of a £3.9 billion annual giveaway for the Treasury — is due to

House hunts often begin in the new year, prompted, perhaps, by the removal of the Christmas tree and its gaudy baubles. Maybe there’s a realisation as you take down the decorations and start work again that the place you live in is a bit tired. There’s a temptation to think that all of life’s problems could be solved by a new start. Fresh-faced house hunters often forget that there are few things more stressful than moving house – bar, perhaps, divorce. Since the housing market has effectively closed shop during lockdown, it’s the ideal opportunity to reflect on how to remove the pressure from the process once there’s a chance

What a strange non-event was the stockmarket reaction to the announcement of the latest national lockdown. Retailers, leisure companies, travel firms – all was calm. Marks and Spencer was down half a per cent on the morning, while Next was up five per cent on the back of good online results before Christmas. EasyJet was down two percent but International Airlines Group (IAG) was up 0.4 per cent. Cruise operator Carnival was down 0.7 percent but travel group Tui was up two per cent. It was just like any other day, as if nothing had happened on the Covid front. But then maybe that is because nothing much had happened.

Not so long ago Monzo could do no wrong. Its hot coral debit card made it a must have accessory for urban millennials and it quickly attracted millions of customers. But the golden child of UK Financial Technology (FinTech) has had a bruising year. Is it experiencing the kind of growing pains we should expect after such a meteoric rise? Or has this banking unicorn transformed into a lame donkey? Having never turned a profit, Monzo now faces questions about its future direction; its annual report released in July really set alarm bells ringing. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, its primary source of revenue – a 0.2 per cent interchange fee

It’s often said that classic cars are one of the best investments around, with some models outstripping the profits to be had in property, art and even gold. The problem is, it’s not really true. Yes, if you were smart enough to buy, for example, a McLaren F1 for £2m a decade ago then you could cash it in today for a tidy profit of at least £8m, and if you happened to snap-up a Ferrari 250GTO in the late 1990s for what might then seemed like an astronomical $7m, it could now be worth something approaching seven times as much.Other blue chip collectable classics have also performed exceptionally well,

The gold price, we keep being told, because investors are seeking a ‘safe haven’. The first part of that sentence is true – from £1100 per ounce at the beginning of this year, gold has surged to £1500 per ounce this week. But are those buying it really doing so because it is ‘safe’ investment? Come off it. It is easy to get on the wrong side of a stock market or property boom, but gold has proved are a far more insidious destroyer of wealth over the decades. Had you fallen for the lustre of gold in 1980, when it was selling for £280 an ounce it would have

With flexible working set to increase after the coronavirus, more Londoners will be in the market for a commuter bolthole. While the likes of Guildford have been drawing in commuters for decades, experts predict that we’ll see new hotspots emerge in coming years. ‘With the adoption of new working practices, people are realising how easy it is to work from home,’ says Philip Harvey, a senior partner with the consultancy Property Vision. ‘As a result the “golden hour” – the name given to the old commute – has been pushed to 90 minutes, or even two hours,’ he says, predicting that the Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire borders will be increasingly

In Lockdown we’ve read townies want to be country bumpkins and you could be just as productive in West Dorset as you could in West London. For most this is a binary choice so what’s it going to be? Bucolic imagery is no substitute for real life and despite repeated promises from Whitehall, BTopenworld and a mobile industry criminally unable to deal with roaming, the reality for a significant minority, if not majority, of rural dwellers is that countryside communications are woeful. Last time I checked you got a mobile signal and fibre in W6. For several decades the demographic shift has been very much to live in conurbations. Particularly